The Software Developer’s Career Handbook by Michael Lopp

Author:Michael Lopp
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Published: 2022-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

Go Team!

A toxic person kills, and by kills, I mean totally destroys teamwork.

“Teamwork” is one of those painful managementese buzzwords that is clumsily used at inopportune times as a means of motivation. “We need better teamwork to improve efficiency and productivity.” I know what you mean, but there are better ways to say it. Fact is, teamwork—teams of people actually working together—is magical.

It’s not actually magic. It’s years of practice, starting in elementary school where you learned the basics: raise your hand when you want to speak, say “please” and “thank you,” and don’t eat the glue. In school, you learn just as much about how to deal with different types of personalities as you do about the world, so when it comes time to jump into the workforce, you already have years of experience in social interactions with a variety of personalities.

However, all of these hand-raising, glue-free pleasantries barely prepare you for a toxic personality.

Let’s go back to the personality buckets I described earlier: natural, work, and toxic. Let’s say the cost of natural relationships is 1x. It’s the base unit. It’s no work; it’s simple. Let’s say that the work relationships are 2x. It requires twice as much effort on your part to bridge the communication and social gap. It’s not difficult; it’s just work. You reduce this cost as you gather more experience and as you get to know people a bit, but these relationships will never be totally natural. Fact of life.

A toxic relationship cannot be measured in terms of these work units, because, at its core, it does not work. You never get to a state of comfortable communication in these relationships. They are never predictable, nor very productive, because you are in a constant state of social corrosion. There are brief moments of clarity where you have a lightning strike of insight: she’s this way because I said that, and this is how she always reacts to that...so I won’t do that. Brilliant!

These moments of respite are short-lived. For reasons you may never understand, you are incapable of reverse engineering this personality, or your patterns of reaction to it, and it’s only a matter of time before you rediscover this basic disconnect and move back to thrashing around, trying to figure out the unknowable.

Yes, this is a worst-case scenario.

Groups of people get along because they all subscribe to a similar culture. Yes, these people are all unique, but they get along because they have a similar belief system and buy into the same goals. This similarity of beliefs has a lot of benefit, but the biggest win is that it reduces organizational friction. There are heated arguments, but they are arguments based on similar beliefs, and the presence of these beliefs means these arguments have a chance of resolution.

Now, think about your base interaction with this toxic person. You sit down in the conference room across from them, and the topic at hand is easy. “We’re discussing a small change to the architecture, and since you own a big part of it, I wanted to get your opinion.

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